Hacker Musings and OCD

The consequences of AdBlock

It appears that you are currently using Ad Blocking software. What are the consequences?

So curious, I clicked through and was given the standard lecture about how things cost money and I’m depriving them of ad revenue.

So tired of this.

This is a fallacious argument, because the purveyors of ad content have, over the course of the past decade or so, rat-fucked the user community more times than a reasonable person would want to count. How many “drive by” exploits were slipped onto user machines via ads? How many IE 0-days are being exploited still?

How many times is a users auto-play preference disrespected? “But if we don’t autoplay, then the user won’t hear the ad or pay attention to it it all really”, they might say. Well, yeah? The user wanted content. Ads aren’t the content.

Oh, but nowadays they are. Just getting to content without an adblock app is sometimes difficult to the point of frustration, even for experienced users.

Give it a fucking rest, content providers. If I don’t know you, if I can’t personally trust you, there’s no way I’m letting any random asshole’s content execute on my machine. If you want ads, make them small, text-based, and clearly labelled. You have to earn my trust: not shame me into it.